Shadow, a 2020 Y Combinator alum founded by college dropout Kennan Frost and acquired by competitor Recharge, the the companies announced on Thursday.
Both Skio and Recharge make products that manage subscription payments for brands.
While the official press release did not disclose the terms of the deal, Frost (who had previously left the company), posted on X, LinkedIn and Instagram that his startup walked away with $105 million in cash and had raised only $8 million from investors. That’s a healthy performance by any measure.
His posts about the deal were republished by Skio Y Combinator investors and Nicolas Wittenbornfounder of VC firm Adjacent.
Frost did not run the company for about two years, according to a LinkedIn post by current Skio CEO Aidan Thibodeaux, who started as the startup’s first COO. When he took over, he described a problem that didn’t involve spending on marketing, advertising or a sales force. Instead, they focused spending solely on manufacturing the product. He and the establishment CTO, Andrew Chenmade all sales call themselves, he wrote.
Frost’s story is even more shocking. In his Instagram post, he wrote that he founded the startup on his own after a panic attack caused him to quit his job as an engineer at Pinterest. COVID shut down the world two weeks later.
Frost joined YC and says in another post that he “completely failed during the batch” until he turned to this subscription idea. In three years, he brought the company to $10 million in ARR and, he says, profitable. Then another “group came together and turned that early attraction into a real company,” he credits.
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His adviser at YC, Gustaf Alströmer, confirmed the terms of the sale to X. Alströmer described how the founder struggled during his tenure at the helm, but never gave up.
Frost says that at the time of the sale the company was at $32 million in ARR and had processed $4 billion in payments. He now works at another startup he founded, Iconwhich offers a product called AdMaker for creating ads and tracking ad campaigns.
Frost, Recharge and Wittenborn could not immediately be reached for comment.
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